posted by Annelise Riles
I was scheduled to speak at the AALS Financial Institutions breakfast this morning, but due to flight cancellations I was unfortunately unable to attend. I’m posting below a summary of what I intended to say there, and which I had already planned to share with the readers of Credit Slips anyway. I wanted to talk about what anthropological research among market participants and regulators tells us about how to change the way people behave in the financial markets. After all, the whole point of regulation is just this--to change behavior. Yet how do you do it?
Continue reading "Building a Culture of Compliance" »
posted by Annelise Riles
In the wake of the Wikileaks debacle, we have started to see some conversation in the editorial pages about whether transparency is always a good thing in international affairs. The point is that there are times when allowing the parties to talk in private may help to reach optimal outcomes for all sides. As we learn more about the personalities and motivations behind the leaks, also, the image of the whistleblower as the pure-hearted pursuer of truth and justice is getting a bit tarnished. It is a complicated issue, with room for reasonable people to disagree, but that in itself is news: it used to be that if you were against transparency you had to be for cronyism, corruption, and fraud, and in fact everybody everywhere felt compelled to assert that they were of course in favor of full public disclosure. Now we are not quite so sure.
I think that some of the heatlhy skepticism--or at least complexity of thought--about transparency that is coming into the public debate about foreign affairs also has a place in the conversation about the regulation of financial markets. Why?
Continue reading "What Can We Learn from Wikileaks About Market Regulation--or, Is Transparency Always a Good Thing?" »
posted by Annelise Riles
Elizabeth Warren has proposed, as one of her first initiatives, that banks should simplify their standardized credit card contracts with customers to insure that customers understand what they are signing.This proposal has generated lots of enthusiasm among centrists as a modest, relatively non-political initiative, something that hardly anyone could be against, but that holds out the possibility of reducing fraud and confusion in the credit markets by at least ensuring that consumers know what they are getting into.
Continue reading "Memo to Elizabeth Warren: How to Do Things With Documents" »
posted by Annelise Riles
Hello everyone and thank you so much to Bob and Adam for bringing me into this exciting conversation. This week I want to raise with you a few thoughts about the way forward on financial regulation that have come out of interviewing and observing regulators in their interactions with market participants over ten years. My research has been mainly in Japan but involves some US components as well.
Continue reading "Market Governance Is About People (And How They Think)" »